


Firmament

by Lee_Whimsy



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:36:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lee_Whimsy/pseuds/Lee_Whimsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo, more or less by accident, had become a collector of rings.  Gollum’s ring he kept in his pocket, safely hidden away, but another he wore—never mind that it was far too large, and always slipping off his finger. </p><p>“It suits you,” Thorin said, and took Bilbo’s hands in his.  “There.  Now you hold all that is dear to me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firmament

**Author's Note:**

> For Lina, and originally posted on tumblr.

For the third night in a row, Bilbo woke to find his lover gone.  The blankets beside him were cool to the touch, and he rolled over onto Thorin’s side of the mattress, sighing a little.  They finally had a proper bed, and a door with a latch, and more privacy than they knew what to do with, although Bilbo had a few ideas.  And Thorin was nowhere to be found. 

Bilbo was far too sensible to try stealing Thorin’s attention away from the business of their quest.  If he insisted on brooding, though, he could at least have the decency to stay in bed, instead of wandering around Laketown at all hours on the night.  
  
Wind gusted through the gaps in the shuttered windows.  He could hear the low murmur of conversation from the room next to theirs, and wondered what was keeping Fíli and Kíli up so late.  Once he would have suspected them of planning some mischief, and carefully checked his clothes for burrs the next morning.  But these days Kíli was more apt to scowl than to laugh, and the brothers spent their idle hours on swordsmanship, not sport or troublemaking.  
  
Bilbo sighed again.  Then he wriggled out from under the warm soft blankets and poked around the darkened room until he found some vaguely acceptable clothes.  Even in the fine house that the Master had given them, they still kept watches, so when he slipped quietly outside he found Bombur sitting by the door, whittling down a block of wood.  “Did you see which way Thorin went?” he asked.  
  
Bombur nodded in the direction of the docks on the northern side of town.  “And last night, and the night before.”  
  
Bilbo headed down the street, the wooden planks rough and uneven under his bare feet.  There were only a few torches lit this late at night, and they ended abruptly at the edge of the water; Thorin was there, a dark figure silhouetted by starlight. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said as Bilbo approached.  He didn’t turn around.  
  
“You didn’t.”  Bilbo settled down on the edge of the dock, his legs dangling over the edge.  Water lapped against the upright wooden timbers beneath his feet.  He stared up at the stars, watching the silent motion of the moon across the black velvet sky; presently it slipped into a bank of clouds and vanished.  
  
“Look.” Thorin broke their silence and pointed across the lake.  “Erebor.  Can you see it?”  
  
“Of course I can’t.  It’s the dead of night, and I’m not an owl.  Nor a dwarf.”  
  
Thorin laughed in his soft, silent way.  “No, Master Baggins.  No one could mistake you for a dwarf.”  
  
“I should hope not.”  Bilbo, balancing precariously, dipped one foot just low enough to splash in the bitter water.  There was something about being on the edges of things, close enough to be afraid of falling.  
  
“The folk of this town speak of the stars they sail by,” Thorin said.  “Among my own people we know the marks that rule a man’s life; you might call it fate.”  
  
Bilbo pulled his feet out of the water, shivering.  The wind gusting across the lake was frigid. “You mean Oín’s portents."  
  
Thorin wordlessly slipped off his coat and handed it over.  It wasn’t his old fur coat, which after the grime and clinging spiderwebs of Mirkwood had been beyond salvage.  But the men of Laketown were more than willing to trade with dwarves, even if many of them still grinned behind their hands when anyone called Thorin a king.  
  
“Oín has great faith,” Thorin said as Bilbo settled the coat over his shoulders.  It smelled of smoke, and he wondered idly who had owned it before Thorin.  “His mother taught us such things when we were children.  Ravens herald the coming of a king.  Whistling in the dark of the mines is dangerous; it calls up the nameless ones.  Mirrors and still water will bring wisdom and good fortune.”    
  
“And Gandalf said that you would have thought it an ill omen, if the Company numbered only thirteen,” Bilbo offered.    It was strange to hear Thorin speaking so freely about such things.   How many times had he asked Balin what was being said when Nori and Dori fell to arguing in Khuzdul?  At the start of their long march east he had pestered the dwarves to tell him about Belegost and Nogrod, and other strange old names he had only ever seen on crumbling maps.

He had given up before they reached Rivendell.

“Aulë made us well, and strong as stone.”  There was a strange cadence to the words, as if Thorin was reciting something.  “Illúvatar gave us minds for the knowing of things, and hearts for wisdom and the keeping of faith.  When our seven fathers awoke in the mountains, only Durin was alone; the others had slumbered hand in hand with their wives, who were as old as they, as clever and fearless.  So the proudest of our ancestors numbered thirteen, and Durin wandered long with no one to stand at his side.  He suffered much.”    
  
For a moment, the moon escaped from its clouds.  Thorin looked down at Bilbo, and his eyes were soft.  “But here you are, Mr. Baggins.  My fourteenth.”  
  
Bilbo stared, trying and failing to see Thorin’s face more clearly in the clouded light.  “Surely you don’t mean that,” he said.  “I mean, not the way it sounds.  Not, that is to say—” he floundered for a moment.  “Not as Durin’s heir.”  
  
“I can be nothing else.  You are the star that steers me; you are the mark by which I must live or die.”  He smiled at him, but it was a small, anxious expression.  “You are—fond of me, Mr. Baggins, are you not?”  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bilbo said thoughtlessly.  “You know perfectly well that I love you.  Really, to be fishing for compliments at your age.”  
  
Thorin’s shoulders slumped, just a little.  “You should not tease me so.”  
  
“And you shouldn't doubt me.”  Bilbo edged over a few inches on the edge of the dock, close enough to curl up against Thorin’s side.   What silliness Thorin was talking.  However useful Bilbo had been so far (and he would admit with satisfaction that more than once he had proved uncommonly handy) he owed it to desperation and unexpected cleverness, to say nothing of his own good luck.  There was nothing mysterious about it.   “You trusted me well enough in the Elvenking’s dungeons.”  
  
“And you rescued us, just as you said you would.  Forgive me; I am not accustomed to such things.”  
  
“Not accustomed to what, precisely?  To being saved by a silly gentlehobbit?”

“To being in love,” Thorin said, and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. 

Bilbo reached up and took his hand, tracing idle patterns on his calloused palm.  This was far, far nicer than any coat.  “You’re always so warm,” he said, and he fancied for one wild moment that there was a live coal pressed into Thorin’s battered chest.  Bilbo had shared Thorn’s bed since the Company had come to Laketown.  Only he knew that as they drew near to the mountain the exiled king was restless even in rest.  He dreamt of dragonfire and the funeral pyres of Azanulbizar; he stoked his rage like the heat of a forge.   It was a heady thing, to be loved by such a lord.  
  
For a while there was no sound but the slow lapping waves against the dock.  A shock of raucous laughter shattered the peace; a few drunken watchmen, wandering home at last.   Then Thorin pulled away for a moment, and Bilbo made a small noise of protest. 

“Here,” Thorin said, when he took Bilbo’s hands in his own again.  “Take this.”  
  
Bilbo wrapped his fingers around something small and metal.  It was Thorin’s ring.   
  
“Put in on,” he said.  Bilbo tentatively obeyed.  It was far too large, of course, and the metal still warm from the heat of Thorin’s hand.  “There.  Now you hold all that is dear to me.”  
  
Thorin believed it, Bilbo realized.  
  
Thorin believed in him, and in something even beyond him.  He had become a talisman, a good luck charm that Thorin could touch and kiss and trust to break him out of dungeons.   Erebor was still a distant dark shape across the water, an empty silhouette, but Bilbo kept him company on the damp wooden dock while he watched and longed and dreamed.  
  
It was a lonely place to be, even if Thorin was looking at him, now, not at the mountain.    
  
Bilbo looked back, but the moon had vanished again, and if their eyes met he couldn’t see it.  “I love you,” he said, and blindly reached forward.  The rough wood of the dock scraped his knees.  Somehow it felt as if he were falling from a great height.  
  
Thorin leaned down, hands steady on Bilbo’s shoulders, and kissed him.  Bilbo found his way into Thorin’s lap, hands tangling in his long dark hair; he was as conscious of the ring on his finger as he was of Thorin’s lips, rough and familiar, pressed against his own.

* * *

  
Bilbo was going home.  
  
Balin had warned him that he wouldn’t be able to slip away quietly, that there were dozens of dwarves who wanted to say their farewells.  Not just the Company, but Dain’s solders, too, and everyone that had decided to stay in Erebor after the battle.  Bilbo only shrugged, and said that they could do as they liked; he made his most important goodbyes in private.  
  
There was Bofur, of course, who tugged anxiously at his hat and asked if Bilbo was certain he didn’t want to stay.  When Bilbo shook his head, Bofur pulled him into an enormous bear hug and said “You just mind yourself, won’t you, lad?  We’ll see you again, and you’ll have all sorts of grand stories to tell.”  
  
Dwalin didn’t say anything in particular.  He had found a small axe somewhere in the old royal armories and he made sure that Bilbo had it stowed safely in his baggage.   Dori fussed a little; it was in his nature, never mind that he was missing most of one leg and that his siblings had now taken to fussing over him.   Fíli smiled and clapped him on the back, and if the expression was a little strained, Bilbo was careful not to see it.  
  
Kíli, who hadn’t done much smiling at all for a long time, only said that they would be sorry to see him go.   Everyone knew that he blamed himself for what happened to Thorin.  But perhaps he blamed Bilbo, too—for not being there when he should have been, and for betraying Thorin’s trust.  
  
For leaving.  
  
Bilbo didn’t know what the rest of the old Company thought about it, but these days it was practically impossible to imagine life without them.  Whenever he thought of home, of his study and his little garden path and the fire blazing in the stone hearth at the Green Dragon, he could only imagine a lingering silence in empty rooms, a quiet unpopulated Hobbiton that had none of the noise and clamorous life he had grown used to.  
  
Gandalf left the mountain early that morning, promising to meet him in what was left of Laketown, and Bilbo soon made to follow.  He would have a dwarven escort as far Mirkwood, and Thranduil had offered to make them welcome for a time in his own halls.   
  
There was just one farewell left for him to make, and then he would be on his way home at last.  
  
Thorin was in the grand hall.  True to Balin’s prediction, it seemed every dwarf in Erebor’s meager population was gathered there, too, to bid farewell to their hobbit.  Bilbo swallowed hard, reminded himself that he had faced a dragon not once but several times, and stepped up to stand in front of the king of Erebor.  
  
“Well,” he said.  He stared fixedly at his feet. “I suppose this is it.”  
  
“Your contract is well fulfilled,” said Thorin.  “Are you certain you do not want to stay—for the winter, at least?  The mountain passes are perilous this late in the year.”  
  
“Gandalf says that I’ll be home in time for the first strawberries, so long as I stay out of trouble.  And he’ll be with me the whole way; I expect we'll manage.”  
  
“And you will take no greater reward?  You may have anything that pleases you, so long as it is in my power to give.”  
  
 Bilbo looked up at that, startled, and met his gaze.  Thorin’s wounds were more or less healed, though the scars were still red and cut an ugly swath across his face.  The worst of the damage was hidden underneath his clothes.  Those were of a finer cloth than Bilbo had ever seen, and he wore a crown, a band of mithril and sapphire that had once belonged to Thorin I, the first king of Erebor.   
  
“No,” said Bilbo.  “There’s nothing else I want.  But I do have something of yours I ought to give back.” 

He slipped Thorin’s ring off his thumb.  He had worn it ever since that night at Laketown; if it weren’t for his habit of fiddling with it when he was nervous, he might have forgotten that he still had it.  As it was, he had thought of giving back a dozen times since the battle, but Thorin spoke to him only rarely.  Somehow it had never seemed quite right.    “Here,” he said, and held it out.  
  
Thorin didn’t move, or even flinch, but somehow he looked as if he’d just been struck.  His mouth tightened.  “I have come by wisdom late in the day.  Undeserved though it is, I had hoped for your forgiveness.  I would take it as a kindness, if you kept my ring.”  
  
“I couldn’t,” Bilbo said, perhaps more sharply than meant to.  How could he bear to keep such a thing, when it would only remind of what he could never have again?  He would go home to the Shire and bury himself in his studies for a year, or two, or however long it took.  And then he would go about the business of ordinary life again, or the best imitation of it he could manage.   Bilbo might have been brokenhearted but he wasn’t broken, and he had no intention of wallowing.  
  
He was about to tell Thorin exactly that, crowd or no crowd.  But then—  
  
But then Thorin, proud and unyielding as the mountain itself, the stubbornest dwarf that Bilbo had ever known, cursed under his breath and dropped to his knees before the whole of his court.  “All my years of wandering,” he said, “and I have found you at last.  If this is the price of my victory, to be the unhappy king under the mountain, to live every day henceforth without you at my side—”  
  
“Thorin,” Bilbo said.  “Please, don’t.”  
  
“I would rather be a blacksmith,” Thorin said, and took Bilbo’s hands in his own.    
  
Bilbo tried halfheartedly to tug him to his feet.   “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” he said, faintly.  “I go to all the trouble of seeing you crowned king, and you insist on kneeling to a Baggins of Hobbiton?”  A surge of panic threatened to choke him, just as it had so often in the past months.  In Bag End, when he had read that damnable contract, and when the trolls caught him, and in Mirkwood when he was forced to watch, invisible, as guards dragged his friends before the Elvenking.  The hideous moment when Thorin had gone mad on the battlements of Erebor.  
  
Thorin was unmoved.  “It does not shame me to kneel to you.”  
  
Bilbo took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and deliberately glanced away.  He could never be reasonable about anything when he looking at Thorin’s dear, hopeful face—scarred badly enough that Thorin would never be handsome again, but still achingly familiar.  
  
He looked instead at the crowd of dwarves, many of them strangers, who had come to see him off.  He looked at Fíli, who would one day be king under the mountain, and at Kíli who would see that he never went the way of their grandfather or great-grandfather.   The echoing heights of Erebor loomed above them all, carven pillars vanishing up into the darkness.  One day these empty halls would be the beating heart of an entire kingdom, and Thorin would sit on his throne and rule over all of it.  Bilbo tried to imagine sitting beside him, but it was hopeless.  
  
There was nothing for it.  
  
“This has always belonged to the king under the mountain,” Bilbo said.  “You, well.  You really should keep it.”   He held out his hand again.  
  
Thorin took his ring slowly, but he didn’t stand.   “Forgive me,” he said.  His voice was dead.  “I asked too much of you.  It seems that pride will always be my downfall.”  
  
It wasn’t right, standing over Thorin when he looked so wretched, so Bilbo knelt too, scrambling for a way to explain.  “No, it’s not—it’s nothing like that.  It’s only that I couldn’t bear disappointing you, letting our people down.  And I would.  I’m not a prince or a great lord, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and someday you’re going to realize that.  I can’t be your good luck forever, Thorin.  I can’t be anything more than what I am.  You can—” he wasn’t it explaining it properly, he knew, but he was trying so hard to make him understand, “—you can love the stars, but they can’t love you back.  And I’ll love you until the day I die, but that doesn’t mean I’ll going to wait around for you to realize that it’s not enough.”  
  
Thorin stared at him.   
  
“Don’t you realize,” he began, and reached out to touch Bilbo’s cheek.   “Don’t you realize that you could live here all your life, and never do anything more than write and garden on the terraces, and go wandering where you pleased?  I will share all I posses with you, and gladly, but if you want none of it I will love you nonetheless.”   His voice was shaking, just a little.  “So long as you want me.  I hope for nothing more than that.”  
  
Bilbo said nothing.  He had realized early on that it was up to him to be the sensible one in their affair; back when it still was an affair, before their brutal falling out.   Thorin was Durin’s heir, and his father’s son, but he was not his own person; he had neither the spirit nor the inclination to do what he pleased simply because it pleased him to do it.  Bilbo had thought at first that he was Thorin’s one indulgence, that falling in love with a hobbit of the Shire was all at once the bravest and the most selfish thing that Thorin had ever done.   
  
 _My fourteenth_.   
  
Now Thorin had Erebor, and his grandfather’s murderer was dead.  Their contract was fulfilled, and whatever heartfelt nonsense Thorin had once harbored about Bilbo, the disaster of the Arkenstone had ripped his chest wide open.  But Thorin was looking at him exactly the same way that he had once looked, with mingled love and desperation, on the home he lost so long ago.  
  
There was a rising, giddy joy in his heart.  It made him feel curiously light: weightless and invulnerable, just like that summer morning when he had first rushed down his garden path without even so much as a pocket handkerchief.  
  
“Well,” he said, “perhaps we can figure it out as we go along.”  And then, as Thorin was looking at him with dawning wonder, he added: “Will I need to recite anything in Khuzdul, when I marry you?  I’ve wanted to learn for months now.”  
  
Thorin choked out a laugh, and pulled him so close that Bilbo’s chest ached.  Somehow as they were getting back to their feet he managed to slip his ring back on Bilbo’s finger.   Bilbo barely noticed.  It was only a ring, after all.  They would settle who it belonged to later, if it mattered at all.  
  
In the meantime there was a ragged cheer rising from the crowd, which should have been painfully humiliating but somehow wasn’t, and nearest to them he could hear Kili laughing for the first time since the battle.  Thorin was holding his hand again; it was entirely possible that he never meant to let go.  
  
Really, Bilbo decided, it didn’t feel like falling at all.


End file.
